25 January 2018

Your editorial about the collapse of Carillion (20 January) ignores why PFI contracts were chosen in the first place. It had less to do with “greed” than with financial constraints and deficiencies in skills in the public sector.

In the 1980s, for example, there was a scandal of maintenance backlogs in NHS hospitals. Clinical priorities led to money being allocated to medical services, rather than maintaining the estate. One answer was PFI: a contractor would build and then maintain a new hospital, so that maintenance expenditure was carried on.